New Addition

We have a new baby at our house! She was awake and crying every 2 hours last night, and I feel once again that I have slept the sleep of a new mother. But who could be angry with this little cutie?



She is a Moyen Poodle, which is a size between Standard and Mini, more popular in Europe than America. Having had one of each size, we thought we'd split the difference this time, and get a playmate for poor Kali.



So far, Kali plays a bit too rough, but it doesn't seem to deter the little one. They are actually cousins, as Kali's father, and Puppy's mother were siblings. She is still un-named. We are open to any suggestions that don't include any fru-fru poodle names like "Fifi", "Fluffy", or "Cream Puff".

We were supposed to get her last weekend, but the long trips to Washington last week for testing, and the day trip to Somerset for the Memorial Service for JP's friend took precedence over taking a puppy outside to pee every 2 hours.

We had guests for most of the weekend. These guys, plus the wife of one of them, came Friday night, and drove to the Memorial Service with us. That night, after returning from the service, we played cards and ate homemade pizza and popcorn late into the night in R's honor.



I'm not sure why I'm feeling such pain for his widow, much more so than in other situations I've been faced with recently. Perhaps it is because I have known them both so long - before they were married, in fact. I have always know them as R & B: an item on campus.

B is not tall, my height or perhaps a bit shorter. Following the service on Saturday, we were encircling her - JP, his tall roommates, and we two spouses. She looked up at the men and and asked, "You won't get together without me, right?" Of course we can't - she is part of the equation!

In the meantime, my Dad finished our garage! It looks wonderful! We had considered going out for dinner to celebrate, but we felt too exhausted emotionally and otherwise from the weekend already.



JP spent some time on Sunday, while I was trying to catch up on laundry, organizing some more both in the garage and in the barn. He rigged a 3 pulley system from the barn rafters to hang his bicycle and mine. It worked fine, until a cable pulled loose and they plummeted to the floor. Mine looks none the worse for the fall, but JP's rear wheel is no longer circular in shape.

Unfortunately, the lack of sleep last night did not put us in prime shape to return to work and school today. We're doing our best.

I Gave Up Winter For Lent

I'm not even Catholic, although I attended St. Mary's Catholic School for 2 1/2 years of my education. I actually LIKED the plaid skirts, believe it or not! In any case, giving up something for Lent is not something I actually do.



I am, however, enjoying my Lenten Roses. I found another one blooming this week.



They are each different. I have 3 more that don't really look like they will bloom this year. I have seen pictures of chocolaty brown ones, and I am hoping that one of my hold-outs might turn out like that!



This weekend I moved the chickens out of the garden and gave their coop a long overdue hose down. They are now stationed on our front lawn...strange, I know, but we are hoping they can green up the poorly growing grass there.

After moving the coop for the first time in 3 months, I hauled 3 wheelbarrows full of poo to the compost bin. The bin is now filled to capacity, since my Mom cleaned out her flower beds of Fall leaves this weekend as well.

Now that the chickens are moved, we can start planting the garden! JP tilled lime and compost into 2 beds, and my Mom and I planted peas. We got them planted between rain showers. Once it dries up a bit more, I'll prep another bed for lettuce and radishes.

JP worked in the garage all weekend, and I helped him some, in between washing and hanging out 5 loads of laundry. Mostly everything has been retrieved from different temporary storage places, and have found permanent homes in the cabinets. There will still be a tall closet and a low set of drawers to go in, then the last couple of bins can be emptied. What a difference they all make! (I'll post pictures next week, when it should be completed.)

The girls had a great weekend as well. They spent all day yesterday outside in the fresh air and sunshine.



Tomorrow, J starts her 3 day stretch of PSSA testing...required for all students in PA. We have to travel to another University about 25 minutes away. L and I will work on school work from the laptop. 2 of the 3 days I will have to dash off to work once we return home. It will be a crazy next few days.

Maybe I should give up Cyber Schooling for Lent next year?

Bursting Out

Spring is bursting out all over up here on Poplar Ridge! The weeping cherries, my Mother's Day gift last year, are covered with buds, as are most of the Cleveland pears, as well as the fruit trees up in the Orchard.

Another Helebore is budding, this one is a bit darker in color.




The crocuses, which have been pointing their tiny green spears of leaves through the mulch for the past couple of weeks, are finally blooming. This year I believe I can save them from being munched by the resident Odocoileus virginianus population, since they are safely behind bars.



The daffodils are rising from their long sleep as well. I am happy to see the ones that I transplanted from a bunch that was growing down by the mailbox (and fought a crazy rooster for) are coming up as well. Last year the deer ate the buds off the daffodils too, but maybe they won't be so hungry this Spring as last???

Little Miss L's teeth are bursting out also! She lost another one on the top yesterday.

The Toothless Wonder

JP was sick yesterday, so our original weekend plans have changed. We must (somehow) move things around in the garage AGAIN today if we want Dad to proceed with the cabinet building. It will be lovely to have a weekend where we don't move things in the garage or try to hang the bird feeders (we've ignored that project for a couple of weeks now).

In the meantime, the pulse of Spring is faintly pounding in my own veins. It will gradually work itself up to a crescendo, at which point I will be unable to do anything but dig in the dirt. It's coming...!

Furniture Building

My Dad has been working in our garage for most of the winter. He built the last bay into his woodshop, which is pretty much set up at this point, but not complete. He even re-purposed our old central vacuum unit for clean up there. He still plans to build enclosed cabinets underneath everything for storage that won't get dusty.



In the meantime, he is back to working in our 2 bays, building similar enclosed storage for all of the stuff that we have been moving from one side to the other in the garage for the past couple of months.

The woodshop came in handy last weekend for furniture building. My friend had the great idea of building fairy gardens with our crowd of fairy fanatic girls, so we scheduled the activity for President's Day (no school!) In anticipation of this, JP sliced up some sticks and small logs for me, which I then fashioned into tiny tables and swings.



We vacuumed up, and left the woodshop to the elves for the remainder of the weekend.

Garage Reveal

My Dad has been working hard on the garage this Winter. The first thing he did was to build a wall between the two-car door and the single-car door. The last bay is evolving into his wood shop. Now he is working on finishing all the walls on both sides.

As a result of this whole renovation project, JP and I have had to rearrange things in the garage several times. Initially our stuff was spread over the entire garage, and included things like the ATV, all our bicycles, the push mower, and the rototiller, as well as "normal" garage things such as motor oil and tools.

So, we've gone from storing EVERYTHING in the garage during house construction...



...to FINALLY fitting our vehicles in...



...to this:



We still plan to do some rearranging. Once the wood shop is up and running, Dad plans to build floor to ceiling cabinets for storage. John's workbench will be revised to fit into the nook at the far right of the picture.

The corner closet on the left side hides the central vacuum and our recycling.



The girls and I put 2 coats of paint on the ceilings and walls on the left side, over Christmas Break. I still need to get up on a ladder and paint around the hoist (the unpainted part in the first photo), but I'm not in any hurry!


Doesn't it look great?

Greening

I am finally posting from the NEW computer, and I used Photo Shop for the first time to edit photos, so the whole process is taking more than twice as long as normal. Whew!


Today was a beautiful day...apparently the last one we will have for a while. A winter mix of weather is headed our way, with snow forecast for Thanksgiving. L believes that as soon as it snows, her birthday is not far behind!


I wanted to post a few pictures of the lawn before it gets buried in snow. It is GREENING up nicely. There will be several bare spots and a bunch of holes thanks to the cattle, but the landscaper has promised to re-evaluate things in the Spring and fix them. Here is a shot of the front yard, taken from the driveway.




This picture shows our yard in the background, but in the foreground you can see Dad sealing the seams on his first floor decking. The OSB is painted a light GREEN to protect it from the weather. After some rain, Mom and Dad were able to see a few leaks in the basement. That did not stop them from unloading the PODS and the storage shed into there. Their basement/garage is much more organized than ours was when we moved. Hopefully it is more rodent proof as well!




This is their GREEN garage door. Dad made this door to fit the walk-through doorway. The doors and windows to be used on their house come in another shipment in the Spring.




Finally, a shot of Kali. She was to the vet on Thursday, and now weighs in at 13#. She is head and shoulders above Daisy Dog at this point! She likes to lie on clothes, so she slept on the dirty laundry for quite a while yesterday until I got around to putting it in the washer. Laundry is one of those things that just doesn't quit these days. That and the dishes and cleaning...

Making Hay While the Sun Shines

It has been a gorgeous weekend...temperatures in the 60's and 70's and plenty of sunshine. We have had all the windows open and had the opportunity to accomplish a lot outside.

Mom and Dad worked on their house from early in the morning until dusk most days this week. They have 2/3 of the floor joists in, and have started to put the first floor decking on the first 1/3. This is a picture taken from on their first floor. You can see by the "tractor poop" in the distance, that one of the neighbors was out making hay this weekend as well.

Last year it was 70* in November as well. They were putting the finishing touches on our garage right around this time. It is fitting to remember that now, because JP was working hard in the garage this weekend, and now it looks like this:

So now, by my previous statement, we are all moved in! This does not, by any means, mean that we are finished up here. That is an entirely different subject, and I doubt we will be finished for years and years.

I managed to get some things planted and cleaned and organized this weekend, along with the standard laundry, meals and dishes. JP, Mom and myself even had the chance to take in a play at the college last night.

It is quiet right now. L and Kali are sleeping, and JP and J are out sitting in the newly erected tree stand down by the spring. They are scoping for deer, not hunting of course, since it is Sunday.

We are soon heading out for a sea food dinner in honor of my Mom's birthday (which is next week). I will close with a photo of a gorgeous sunset on Poplar Ridge from last week.

Rodent Wars Revisited

I read a book to the girls tonight about a little mouse who lives in a tiny house made of hay in the barn. All of his friends: the cat, the dog, the cow, the horse, and the farmer all squeeze into the house to bring him birthday gifts until finally the tiny hay house explodes. The whole time I was thinking "this mouse is TOTALLY ruining the hay for the rest of the animals, and WHY ON EARTH are the farmer, and the cat, and the dog not putting that awful thing out of its misery?

We have had a rodent experience that is the polar opposite of those sweet, cute little story book mice...the ones that you hope make it out of the claws of the evil cat. We have had rodents which have ruined our furniture, our sanity, and now it seems, our washer.

No longer do we hear the scamper of tiny feet in our ceiling, or the gnawing of tiny teeth on all the pecans stashed in our ceiling. Now instead, we smell the rank and sour scent of their urine which has apparently infiltrated the inside of our washing machine.

We started noticing the scent a couple of weeks after we started using the washer (which was stored all winter in the garage), but it happened to coincide with the period of time in which the exterminators were doing their thing in the house, and chalked it up to decomp. The strange thing is, the smell gets worse for a day or two after I do laundry, and then gets better. My Dad took the front off the washer, and found a nest behind the control panel, but even removing this has not lessened the smell. Now that we are doing more laundry since there are more people in the house, the smell is more or less constant. We had the appliance doctor out today, and he suspects that there is a nest up on top of the drum of my front loading washer. He feels that even if he were to tear apart the machine, find and remove the nest, and put everything back together, it is no guarantee that the smell will go away.

Do you remember where the washer and dryer are? That's right...in my work area. I stay in there at my desk until I feel nauseated and have to leave. I think that the mouse stench might be killing my brain cells. If that isn't, I'm sure the gallons of Lysol and air freshener that we have been pumping into the atmosphere is. I'm not the only one who has the pleasure of experiencing the aroma. The scent does not only linger in my work room, it wafts throughout the house, into the dining area right next to my craft room, and into my parents' room downstairs.

On a more pleasant note, my dad has been working hard at several projects around here. He built a floor to create an attic above the garage. We are already using the space for extra storage (for things that are mouse proof, of course!) He put in a fold-away stairway...

...which leads to the space above. It is really great!

Emptying the Garage

If you have been following this blog at all, or know us, you'll recall that we stored about 75% of our belongings in our 3 car garage over the winter while we resided in a 600 square foot apartment in town. You also might remember that the garage became infested with mice because I shortsightedly left some pecans in a box that I packed, and then the mice moved into the house (along with their pecans). Since we moved into the house back in June (and chased the mice out), we have been trying to clean out the garage of stuff and mouse residue in order to use it for its intended purpose: to park our cars there. It has been slow going, in part because it started out like this:

...and in part because the contractor is still finishing up around here, and has stacks of stuff both in our basement storage area, and in the garage.

This weekend, due to a forecast of several clear and sunny days in a row, we decided to bite the bullet and clear EVERYTHING out of the garage. This is what that looked like.

Then we thoroughly cleaned the garage, including scrubbing it with Simple Green and water.

After it dried, we (JP) painted the floor with 2 coats of Quikrete 1-Part Epoxy Garage Floor Sealer. This was to protect the concrete from salt in the winter and oil all the time.

While that was drying, we took 2 more storage shelves downstairs, and some more things that belong down there. I also separated piles of recycling (which I took out this morning), and Thrift Store donations (which I still need to log and load into the van). Then, after a delicious dinner of Greene County trout, fresh corn on the cob, roasted potatoes, and fresh tomato slices with drizzles of Balsamic Vinegar last evening, we set about to return things to the garage. This is what it looks like now...much more like a garage.

We still need to organize things in there, and we have plywood up above the rafters to screw down as flooring for a storage area up there, but we definitely made progress! In the process, we realized again that we made an error on the plans. The single bay is meant to be a work shop for my Dad, but instead of putting the walk-through door on his side around the corner to the North, it is next to the garage door. We will have 20 feet in which to park our 2 vehicles, which measure together 13 feet wide. (If we had relocated the walk-through door, we would have 3 or 4 more feet of space.) When JP was explaining this to me yesterday, I thought he was saying that we would be unable to park both of our vehicles in the garage, which made me want to rearrange the wood shop space a bit. I now understand that it will just be a close fit, and I'll have to be extremely careful when parking the whale of a minivan! I also see need to have a shed for the mowers and other yard care equipment down the road some day! It will still be a while until the wood shop is entirely set up, meaning that we can use some of that space for storage for a little while longer.

The other step in this process before we can park in the garage is just that: a step.

We need to get some driveway work done, including some gravel in front of the concrete so that we can get the vehicles up there and we don't end up with whip lash injuries every time we try to leave (the driveway is bumpy enough...no need to add to it!)

So, thank you Mom for all of your assistance with the carrying and cleaning this weekend, it was a HUGE help! And sorry, Dad, that we weren't able to sit and chat more...we'll save that for this winter when we are all snuggled up in the home on Poplar Ridge during a snow storm!

Polishing the Silver

I felt quite hoity-toity today putting away the china. This was JP's mother's set, and is very pretty and delicate appearing. It has been in storage for a long time: some of the pieces were wrapped in newspaper from Oregon in 1976! In any case, the china is seeing the light of day again, and has a new home in the built-ins in our great room. I am determined to use it too...if it's here, it has to be functional...that's my new rule.

But I diverge...I opened 5 boxes of china and other fragile doo-dads today, and put most of them away. This means we are to that point of dealing with the not-so-necessary things, the finishing touches: we're polishing up the silver. Hooray!

The building crew is finishing up too. Over the past several days, they finished up the trim on the beams in the front of the house...

...and the porch. They also cleared a truck load of stuff from off the porch and out of the garage.

The trim is finished up on the garage too, and a new light was installed by the door. Today they worked on leveling out the area in front to ready it for the concrete pad that should be poured the beginning of next week.

I finally got around to transplanting my tomato and pepper plants in 5 gallon buckets, which have been in abundant supply around here lately. They are finally blooming, so perhaps we'll even get fresh tomatoes and jalapenos this summer to make salsa.

The central vacuum was installed today. I used it downstairs, but haven't had a chance to use the hard floor attachment up stairs, or to try out my "vac pan" in the kitchen to suck up the stuff I broom up. This is the unit in the garage. The clearish bit underneath is what we will empty every couple of months. There is even a hook-up here, along with another hose and attachments to use on the vehicles in the garage!

Tonight, we watched fireworks from our deck...a late celebration! And now I plan to go to bed before midnight for once, and finally use my beautiful new shower in the morning.

The Second Story

Lo and behold, as we approached the top of the hill this morning, two stories of house rose up above the frozen mud!

The temperatures actually snuck above the freezing mark for two days this week (in fact, they snuck up into the 40's). We enjoyed seeing some blue sky and sunshine, and taking great gulps of fresh, winter air for those couple of days. But I am so grateful to the men who were out working on those not so balmy and lovely days!

This is a shot of the house from the driveway. The doorway will be the main entrance to the house, bringing you in next to the dining room.

This shot gives you an idea of what the view from our Great Room will be like.

Eventually there will be a breezeway between the garage and the house...into the laundry room.

Here is the inside of the main floor. It is so exciting to see new things the past few visits!

Post Christmas Post

Well, a lot has happened in life in the interim between posts. We have had a lot of bad weather...pouring rain, temps in the single digits, ice and iced mud...makes me all the more anxious to get this house under roof so work can continue in the weather, both good and bad!

J went up to the garage yesterday to return the Christmas ornaments and to find life preservers for the girls. I know it seems seems soon to pack up the Christmas things, but we really don't have the room to spare for a Christmas tree in our 600 sq. feet...can't get out the back door (luckily we don't need to do it often). So, we are not too sad to see them go. Even the girls helped to pack things up, and talked about our BIG Christmas tree next year! The life preservers were for our "vacation" to Pittsburgh and swimming in the Hotel pool.

J took this picture, which he speculates is of the footers for weight bearing walls. From left to right: girls rooms, stairs, "exercise room".



The driveway has a new layer of gravel on it. I was hesitant to drive up there last week because I nearly slid down the hill in the mud the week before, so now I can make more regular visits. We have a wedding to travel to in Goshen, IN for New Years, and then the Holiday craziness should be over for good.

Snow on Poplar Ridge

We had our first good snow fall of the season last night, about 3 inches or so. The whole family drove up the hill to see the sights and search through the garage for the Christmas decorations. It is lovely up there, and oh-so-quiet. (We are having problems sleeping in our little apartment due to being located one block north of the train tracks and right on the main street through our small town.) We were able to find most of the decorations, although one of the cardboard boxes had been infiltrated by mice back at the other house.

Here are some lovely icicles on the garage...

and the first floor walls covered with snow.

Apparently our builder came down with the same awful GI bug that plagued our family for the past 2 weeks. Another one of us fell victim to it every 3-4 days! (This follows the week they needed at the last house, Thanksgiving week, and the first week of deer hunting.) Maybe by next week some more progress will be made!

Jam Packed...

I'm finally back from my extended moving break. The move ended up being possibly the worst EVER...rivaled the one where the moving van wrecked. It rained, sleeted or snowed EVERY day, and we kept finding random STUFF in the backs of closets that had to be taken SOMEWHERE. It ended up taking every bit of a week to get out of the house! Now we are squeezed into our 600 square feet here in town, and quite comfy, actually. I realized that I have way TOO much food, so we've been eating a lot of beans and things with tomato sauce in order to get everything to fit in the cupboards.

These are the moving men. They were AWESOME...thanks so much!

Today is the first I've been up to the building site since taking the last load to the garage around the 19th. I haven't missed anything.

The garage is finished except for windows, but they are boarded up, so we are able to store our MOUNTAINS of stuff there. (Hope nothing important freezes!)

They finally got the power lines up our hill...you can barely see them if you look closely at this picture.